I’m not sure about you, but to my old mindset, that is a very bold claim – maybe even provocative. But I don’t mean it to be so, I don’t mean it as an empty or exaggerated claim, I truly now believe that you and I do not owe God anything. And this understanding has had major implications in my relationships with other people and with myself and how I approach life. Many positive fruits have resulted.
Let me begin by posing a few questions that I think are relevant to this idea:
- Have you ever felt pressure or a need to live up to a parent’s, mentor’s, or even an organization’s expectations of you?
- Have you ever felt let down to the point of feeling cheated in a relationship because your efforts and investment in that relationship were not returned in kind? (such as feeling a spouse ought to start ‘pulling their weight’, or a child should be willing to do better given all the effort, and/or birthing, you have put in on their behalf?)
- Have you ever felt people around you owe you common decency, or feel entitled to basic decency if you’re not receiving it?
- Do you find it hard to forgive yourself, for the times you have hurt others whom you should have loved (perhaps a certain damaging way you parented your children, or the harmful way your treated a sibling when you were younger)?
- Have you ever felt like you have failed and/or lack worth, if you have not lived up to a particular worldly or spiritual standard?
I know I have experienced many of these in a significant way, if you said yes to any of the above then perhaps this post may also be of value to you. You may also have been accepting a world view that at its core infringes upon free agency.
Feeling Indebted to God
For most of my life I accepted and believed that I was indebted to God in the real sense of the word. Because I had been blessed with so many privileges, gifts, and opportunities – being born into the LDS faith, born in the wealthiest country in the world with a higher standard of living the 99% of all humans who had ever lived, and having a family I loved with good parents who believed in and sought goodness – I felt very lucky and grateful (and still do).
Yet at the same time I simultaneously accepted the belief that because I had been given much, I too must give – that when it came down to it I owed both God and the world my very best, otherwise I would be letting them down. And wouldn’t I be so ungrateful not to? Surely it was my duty, for how could I fail other people by not living up to those gifts I had been given? It would seem not very fair to those who had not been given. To whom much is given, much is required, right? And didn’t King Benjamin teach that I am forever indebted to God[1], an ever unprofitable servant?
I think this is a reasonable interpretation of the scriptures taken at face value, and I think might even be the prevalent interpretation that is taught. I have now learned for myself that such interpretations and beliefs are not true. And I’d like to tell you why.
In practice, internalizing these beliefs that people can rightly owe each other anything ended up harming me and contributed to hurting others around me. I now believe that there is no such thing as a righteous framework in which any person can owe another being, including God, anything. It is fundamentally incompatible with agency[2].
Which is to say, in any relationship between intelligent beings, human to human, human to God, God to human, human to community, etc., a righteous framework is necessarily founded on the right and freedom to choose good or to choose evil as equally valid choices. From a righteous or loving perspective in a given relationship, it therefore follows that hate and selfishness is just as valid of a choice as is love and goodness, and to pressure or hold an expectation otherwise unrighteously infringes upon that fundamental principle.
Believing People Can Owe Each Other Is Harmful
Let me give you an example from my marriage – the way I approached conflict and conflict resolution. I believed that because we were married and therefore committed to one another, that it was a given that we would ultimately want and try to do right by one another, even if at times we fell short of that goal. That we should therefore give an honest attempt at being our best selves toward one another, knowing that we will not be perfect, but that we should try. And in this frame of mind if a conflict arose, we could appeal to what the right thing was, what the truth was in the situation as best as we could understand it, and then try to come to an agreement on what the ‘right’ thing to do is.
If we agreed on what was ‘right’ for us, we should therefore go and do it, or at least give an honest attempt towards working to do so. In other words, if something is decided to be right – I believed you therefore go and do it, or at least try, because it’s right and you have made a commitment to your partner to make a meaningful and lasting relationship with them. You do what’s right, because it’s right. That was the underlying assumption in my mind.
Do you see the error/s in my approach yet? I wouldn’t have been able to. I was raised with the belief that yes there are blessings associated with doing good, yes there is happiness in goodness, but ultimately you should do the right thing – because it’s the right thing to do. Does that sound like an innocent approach to you? I would have thought so. I would have even called it an honorable approach. And yet there was something that was breaking down, something that was causing tension and even pain in this approach. Was it just the natural tension of growth? Or was there something more at play?
It was very difficult for me to see the flaw in this approach, but once I saw through it, I could never unsee it. It all started when I really began to reflect on gratitude. I noticed that when I, or more often than not when I felt my spouse was not living up to what we agreed was ‘right’, I would internally react a particular way. Specifically, if a little effort had been made still far from what was the person genuinely believed was the right thing to do – how did I feel about that little effort? I’ll create a hypothetical exaggerated example to illustrate.
A Hypothetical Example
Let’s say my spouse has dirty clothes all over our bedroom floor, loose papers and notes across our dressers and desks and multiple dirty bowls and cups that have gathered from weeks of eating in the bedroom. On my side, let’s say I had done nothing for the week in terms of childcare, hadn’t even changed a single diaper. We discuss it and agree both of us have created some problems, and I agree to step up in childcare duties and she agrees to cleanup her things in our bedroom.
The upcoming week I make an extra effort and do the majority of the childcare, and as the days go by I notice that our bedroom isn’t getting any cleaner yet, and possibly even dirtier. Getting close to the end of the week, feeling frustrated now I might say, “Hey, are you still planning on doing something about this.” A few more days go by, and I notice a few of the bowls and a cup have been removed and presumably washed (although I see that there is at least one new bowl in its place and another cup on the other side of the room). At the end of such a hypothetical week, how did I feel? Pretty frustrated. And what did I think about those few dishes that had been taken care of?
If I am honest, my attitude would have been something like, “Wow, what happened, it seems you did pretty much nothing you said you were going to do, did you even try? Didn’t you see the effort I put into my part. This can’t possibly be trying.” Was I grateful for the effort that had been made and those few dishes that were taken care? Compared to everything that wasn’t actually addressed or attempted to be addressed, absolutely not! Especially since I felt I had ‘done my part’.
While hypothetical, it’s pretty representative of actual attitudes I held when I felt minimal effort had been made toward something we had agreed was right and best for our relationship. Was I grateful for small efforts comparatively speaking? I wasn’t.
Why Did I Not Feel Gratitude?
What was going on here? Why did I not feel grateful when efforts had been made, whether big or small? Whether it was realistic or not, what was clear was that I was holding a certain threshold of what ‘at least trying’ was in my mind, and since I felt like I had set that bar pretty low, if that bar wasn’t met, that simply felt unacceptable. I believed a commitment entailed a certain degree of ‘at least trying’ when we agreed to something.
Anything beneath that bar was simply what we should do for each other, not something either she or I would necessarily feel grateful for – it was a baseline. I felt we owed each other that much. In short, I felt owed a degree of goodness. Could this be right? When viewed in this new light it felt very wrong.
[1] I think King Benjamin actually makes a really good argument for why a paradigm of feeling indebted and trying to make up for that debt is foundationally flawed, and ultimately a useless endeavor.
[2] Supporting this idea, a friend pointed out to me that the dictionary definition of to ‘owe’ is “to be under obligation”. The definition of ‘obligation’ is “something by which a person is bound”. And to be ‘bound’ is fundamentally at odds with free agency.